Pawlenty's 'global cooling' myth

June 29, 2011|Steve Chapman

In backtracking from his onetime support of a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gas emissions, Tim Pawlenty apparently is willing to pull out all the stops. Appearing on Fox News, he said he changed his mind because "the science is bad" -- which will come as news to all the scientific organizations and panels that agree human-induced climate change is happening.

He also said, "I'm old enough to remember when people were predicting there was going to be the next ice age. Until recently people were worried as much about global cooling."

This is a familiar argument against global warming predictions -- and a false one. As a 2008 article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society pointed out, "There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age. Indeed, the possibility of anthropogenic warming dominated the peer-reviewed literature even then."

And what if scientists 40 years ago were wrong about something? The trademark of science is to seek out new evidence, make sense of it and follow it where it leads. Where it has led is to the consensus that human activity is heating up the planet.

Politicians are free to reject that view. But they shouldn't pretend that their position has anything to do with science.